A routine which contains many calculations may achieve significant performance increase with NEON. To use NEON instructions, you build a native shared library (.so) written in C/C++ and call functions in it through JNI (Java Native Interface) form a Java app. A CPU which is compatible with ARM v7 or later and supports NEON circuit is required. Apps may switch routines by checking for a device to have NEON support.

We checked for our Android devices to support NEON by using HelloNeon in Android NDK r5b.

Additionally, we show basic specifications and display specifications obtained by tDpiInfo.

Performance is very different between a group of HT-03A and Pocket WiFi S, and a group of Xperia arc and Xoom. Xoom has the highest resolution, but it shows the best performance. Dual Core and GPU may work well. Xperia arc is also very good to use. The 1st group is slow and low-reso, but we use them for application performance tuning.

At a visual point of view, difference of DPI (dot/inch, pixel/inch) is important.

Developer’s guide says 160px/inch is a standard density (=1.0). Each device has its specific value regarding to its display size. Density seems to be rounded to a multiple of 0.25, so actual DPI is a bit different from Density value, for example, HT-03A and Xoom have 1.0 in Density, but DPI are 180 px/inch 149 px/inch, respectively. Because Xperia arc has the high Density1.5, every graphics (including font) should be scaled as 1.5 times large as a default or it may be shown very smaller.

# Yes, ChartExpert has this problem. We are now working to fix it!! ：P

The display metrics for MEDIAS and REGZA Phone are very similar. It is somewhat wondering that Xdpi and Ydpi for these devices are around 160 although Densities for these devices are 1.5 (it means 240dpi).

Regarding our looking, NEON is supported by all devices using Snapdragon. Almost all of recent machines has this chipset family. About tablet types, new Android 3.0 machines often take Tegra2, which don’t support NEON.

2 responses to “NEON Support for Four Android Devices”

I ran tDpiInfo v1.1.5 on a rooted LG-L45C phone running Android Gingerbread v2.3.4 and did not get the reports shown above. I was particularly interested in the CPU details, NEON status, ARM line items. Is there another version of tDpiInfo that was used or an altogether different APP that was actually used?

Hello. Thank you for reading our article.
We have thanked tDpiInfo for bringing information related to display, such as DPI, resolution, and scaling parameter.
To get NEON status, we used the HelloNeon, a sample App included in Android NDK. For details, see http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/overview.html#samples.
To get other CPU details, such as its model number and clock frequency, we checked manually vendor’s sites or other sites like here if a vendor does not provide details.